Capital Punishment: FOR and AGAINST

 

Perhaps all criminals should be required to carry cards which read: “Fragile: Handle with Care”. It will never do, these days, to go around referring to criminals as violent thugs. You must refer to them politely as ‘social misfits’. The professional killer who wouldn’t think twice about using his cosh or crowbar to batter some harmless old lady to death in order to rob her of her meagre life-savings must never be given a dose of his own medicine. He is in need of ‘hospital treatment’. According to his misguided defenders, society is to blame. A wicked society breeds evil ‒ or so the argument goes. When you listen to this kind of talk, it makes you wonder why we aren’t all criminals. We have done away with the absurdly harsh laws of the nineteenth century and this is only right. But surely enough is enough. The most senseless piece of criminal legislation in Britain and a number of other countries has been the suspension of capital punishment.

 

The violent criminal has become a kind of hero-figure in our time. He is glorified on the screen; he is pursued by the press and paid vast sums of money for his ‘memoirs’. Newspapers which specialize in crime-reporting enjoy enormous circulations and the publishers of trashy cops and robbers stories or ‘murder mysteries’ have never had it so good. When you read about the achievements of the great train robbers, it makes you wonder whether you are reading about some glorious resistance movement. The hardened criminal is cuddled and cosseted by the sociologists on the one hand and adored as a hero by the masses on the other. It’s no wonder he is a privileged person who expects and receives VIP treatment wherever he goes.

 

Capital punishment used to be a major deterrent. It made the violent robber think twice before pulling the trigger. It gave the cold-blooded poisoner something to ponder about while he was shaking up or serving his arsenic cocktail. It prevented unarmed policemen from being mowed down while pursuing their duty by killers armed with automatic weapons. Above all, it protected the most vulnerable members of society,

 

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young children, from brutal sex-maniacs. It is horrifying to think that the criminal can literally get away with murder. We all know that ‘life sentence’ does not mean what it says. After ten years or so of ‘good conduct’, the most desperate villain is free to return to society where he will live very comfortably, thank you, on the proceeds of his crime, or he will go on committing offences until he is caught again. People are always willing to hold liberal views at the expense of others. It’s always fashionable to pose as the defender of the under-dog, so long as you, personally, remain unaffected. Did the defenders of crime, one wonders, in their desire for fair-play, consult the victims before they suspended capital punishment? Hardly. You see, they couldn’t, because all the victims were dead.

 

1. Explain the meaning of the following words and expressions:

· a brutal sex-maniac

· to breed evil

· a cold-blooded poisoner

· a hardened criminal

· to deter criminals

· a professional killer

· to do away with

· to get away with murder

· a violent criminal

· to mow down

· to rob

· to batter

 

 

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INDIVIDUAL READING

 

Read, translate and summarize the texts. Make 10 questions to each of them.

 

The Concept of Law

 

Rules may originate in different ways and may have very different relationships to the conduct with which they are concerned. Some rules are made by legislation; others are not. Some rules are mandatory in the sense that they require people to behave in certain ways (e.g. people should pay taxes, whether they wish or not); other rules such as those prescribing the procedures, formalities, and conditions for the making of marriages, wills, or contracts indicate what people should do to give effect to the wishes they have.

 

In England there is a rule that a man must not wear a hat in church or that one must stand up when “God Save the Queen” is played. Most people generally do these things. Most people also may regularly drink tea at breakfast or go weekly to the cinema, and yet there is no rule in England that everyone “must” or “should” go to the cinema each week. But there is a rule that a man must bare his head in church. What then is the difference between habitual behaviour in a social group and the existence of a rule of which the words “must”, “should” and “ought to” are often a sign? Even skilled lawyers have felt that, though they know the law, there is much about law and its relations to other things that they cannot explain and do not fully understand.

(from “The concept of law” by H.L.A Hart)

 

Philosophy of Law

 

Philosophy of law is a branch of philosophy and jurisprudence which studies basic questions about law and legal systems, such as “what is the law?”, “what is the relationship between law and morality?” and many other similar questions. The question “What is law?” has received the most substantial attention from philosophers of law. Three schools of thought have provided rival answers to this question.

 

Natural theory asserts that there are laws that are immanent in nature, to whichenacted laws should correspond as closely as possible. This view is frequently summarized by the maxim: an unjust law is not a true law, in which “unjust” is defined as contrary to natural law.

 

Legal positivism is the view that the law is defined by the social rules orpractices that identify certain norms as laws. Historically, the most important part of this theory was developed by Jeremy Bentham, whose views were popularized by his student, John Austin. Austin’s version of legal positivism was based on the notion that the law is the command of the sovereign backed by the threat of punishment.

 

Legal realism is the view that the law should be understood as it is practiced inthe courts, law offices, and police stations, rather than as it is set forth in statutes.

 

In the 20th century, two great legal positivists had a profound influence on the philosophy of law. On the continent, Hans Kelsen was the most influential theorist, and his legal views are still influential. In the Anglophone world, the most influential figure was Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, who is considered one of the most important legal philosophers. Hart’s most famous

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work is The Concept of Law first published in 1961. He argued that the law should be understood as a system of social rules. Hart’s theory, although widely admired, was criticized by a variety of late 20th century philosophers of law (R. Dworkin, J. Finnis, J. Raz).

 

Laws of Babylon

 

One of the most detailed ancient legal codes was drawn up in about 1758 B.C. by Hammurabi, a king of Babylonia. The entire code, consisting of 282 paragraphs, was carved into a great stone pillar, which was set up in a temple to the Babylonian god Marduk so that it could be read by every citizen.

 

The pillar, lost for centuries after the fall of Babylon in the 16^th century B.C., was rediscovered by a French archaeologist in 1901 amid the ruins of the Persian city of Susa. Hammurabi’s words were still legible. The pillar is now in the Louvre museum in Paris.

 

The laws laid down by Hammurabi were more extensive than any that had gone before. They covered crime, divorce and marriage, the rights of slave owners and slaves, the settlement of debts, inheritance and property contracts; there were even regulations about taxes and the prices of goods. Punishments under the code were often harsh. The cruel principle of revenge was observed: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, which meant that criminals had to receive as punishment precisely those injuries and damages they had inflicted upon their victims. Not only murderers but also thieves and false accusers faced the death penalty. And a child who hit his father could expect to lose the hand that struck the blow.

 

The code outlawed private blood feuds and banned the tradition by which a man could kidnap and keep the woman he wanted for his bride. In addition, the new laws took account of the circumstances of the offender as well as of the offence. So a lower-ranking citizen who lost a civil case would be fined less than an aristocrat in the same position ‒ though he would also be awarded less if he won.

 

Nevertheless, Hammurabi’s laws represented an advance on earlier tribal customs, because the penalty could not be harder than the crime.

 

Napoleon’s Law

 

The laws of much of continental Europe (particularly France), of Quebec in Canada, and of much of Latin America ‒ along with the civil laws of Louisiana ‒ owe their modern form largely to the work of a man who never even studied law. Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican soldier who became emperor of France after the French Revolution, established in 1800 five commissions to refine and organize the diverse legal systems of France. The result, enacted in 1804, was Napoleon’s Code.

 

Some of its original 2,281 articles were drafted by Napoleon himself, and all were affected by his thinking, even though he was completely self-taught in legal matters. The code was a triumphant attempt to create a legal system that treated all citizens as equals without regard to their rank or previous privileges. It was also so clearly written that it could be read and understood by ordinary people at a time when only Latin scholars could make sense of the earlier laws handed down since Roman

 

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times. The code was adopted intact in most of the areas of Europe that Napoleon dominated and spread from there across the Atlantic, taking root particularly in French-speaking American communities. Many of its principles are still in force today.

 

White-Collar Crime

 

Crimes committed by business people, professionals, and politicians in the course of their occupation are known as “white-collar” crimes, after the typical attire of their perpetrators. Criminologists tend to restrict the term to those illegal actions intended by the perpetrators principally to further the aims of their organizations rather than to make money for themselves personally. Examples include conspiring with other corporations to fix prices of goods or services in order to make artificially high profits or to drive a particular competitor out of the market; bribing officials or falsifying reports of tests on pharmaceutical products to obtain manufacturing licenses; and constructing buildings or roads with cheap, defective materials. The cost of corporate crime in the United States has been estimated at $ 200,000,000,000 a year. Such crimes have a huge impact upon the safety of workers, consumers, and the environment, but they are seldom detected. Compared with crimes committed by juveniles or the poor, corporate crimes are very rarely prosecuted in the criminal courts, and executives seldom go to jail, though companies may pay large fines. The term white-collar crime is used in another sense, by the public and academics, to describe fraud and embezzlement. Rather than being crime “by the firm, for the firm,” this constitutes crime for profit by the individual against the organization, the public, or the government. The economic cost of white-collar crime in most industrial societies is thought to be much greater than the combined cost of larceny, burglary, auto theft, forgery, and robbery.

 

Terrorism

 

From the 1960s, international terrorist crimes, such as the hijacking of passenger aircraft, political assassinations and kidnapping, and urban bombings, constituted a growing phenomenon of increasing concern, especially to Western governments. Most terrorist groups are associated either with revolutionary movements (some Marxist organizations) or with nationalist movements. Three categories of terrorist crime may be distinguished, not in legal terms, but by intention. Foremost is the use of violence and the threat of violence to create public fear. This may be done by marking random attacks to injure or kill anyone who happens to be in the vicinity when an attack takes place. Because such crimes deny, by virtue of their being directed at innocent bystanders, the unique worth of the individual, terrorism is said to be a form of crime that runs counter to all morality and so undermines the foundations of civilization. Another tactic generating fear is the abduction and assassination of heads of state and members of governments in order to make others afraid of taking positions of leadership and so to spread a sense of insecurity. Persons in responsible positions may be abducted or assassinated on the grounds that they are “representatives” of some institution or system to which their assailants are opposed. A second category of terrorist crime is actual ruled by terror. It is common practice for leaders of terrorist

 

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organizations to enforce obedience and discipline by terrorizing their own members Groups that come to power by this means usually continue to rule by terror. Third, crimes are committed by terrorist organizations in order to gain the means for their own support. Bank robbery, kidnapping for ransom, extortion, gambling rake-offs (profit skimming), illegal arms dealing, and drug trafficking are among the principal crimes of this nature. In the Middle East, hostages are frequently sold as capital assets by one terrorist group to another.

 

Juvenile Crime

 

Children as young as seven can be tried in a juvenile court. And if you commit a crime when you’re younger than that, your parents will be liable. They may have to stand trial or pay a fine. Yeah, but that’s juvenile court, not the real courts! Watch out! If you commit a serious crime, the judge can waive you to adult court. It’s happened to youths as young as twelve years old!

 

The police never do anything. They just detain you, call your parents and then you go home! Police officers can elect to take a minor into custody if the situation warrants it. Do you want to stay in a juvenile correctional facility?

 

Well, the judge will probably just give you a lecture off-the-record. Or the judge might force you to pay a fine, give you community service, put you on probation, and make you pay back the victim or insist you to go to counseling. Juvenile records may be expunged on your eighteenth birthday, but only if you have proved that your behavior has improved.

 

NOTORIOUS CRIMINALS

Caligula, A.D. 12-41

 

This Roman Emperor will always be remembered for his great cruelty and love of bloodshed. On one occasion, at one of the famous games, at which the gladiators performed, he is said to have remarked that he wished that the Roman people had only one neck so that he could kill them all with one blow. There is little doubt this his extreme cruelty was due to madness, as he started his reign in a very reasonable way. However, after a strange illness, he began to act as though insane and declared himself a god and even gave his horse a high public office. In the end he was murdered by a member of his own bodyguard on 24^th January A.D. 41.

 

Guy Fawkes, 1570-1606

 

Guy Fawkes is the best known member of the gang which planned Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The originators of the plot were Robert Catesby, Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy and John Wright. Fawkes was only brought in later by Catesby, who knew of his reputation for courage. All were Roman Catholics and their plan was to destroy James I and his Protestant Parliament by blowing them up. Percy rented a house next to Parliament and later the cellar below the House of Lords. There Fawkes hid thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, covering them with wood and coal. The plot was discovered when one of the conspirators sent a letter to Lord Monteagle in October 1605 asking him not to attend the opening of Parliament on 5^th November. Suspicions were aroused

 

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and on the night of 4^th November Fawkes was arrested in the cellar. He had been given the task of lighting the fuse to set off the explosion. Tortured, he refused to give the names of his fellow conspirators until they had either been killed or captured. He was executed by hanging on the 31^st of January, 1606.